Survey: Customer success teams lag behind in generative AI adoption

A gap appears to be emerging between customer success teams and other customer engagement functions in their adoption and enthusiasm for generative AI technologies. While most B2B customer-facing teams see significant potential in generative AI, customer success professionals show measurably lower adoption rates and enthusiasm, potentially missing opportunities to leverage AI for enhancing post-sale customer relationships. This disparity raises important questions about technology adoption patterns in customer success functions and whether current solutions adequately address their specific needs.

The enthusiasm gap: Customer success professionals demonstrate notably less optimism about generative AI’s impact compared to their customer engagement counterparts.

• 77% of customer success respondents believe generative AI will significantly impact their function, compared to 95% of customer marketers and 85% of customer experience professionals.
• Daily use of generative AI follows a similar pattern, with 85% of customer success teams using it compared to 91-92% of other customer-facing functions.

Technology adoption patterns: Customer success teams appear to underutilize AI-powered tools that could potentially enhance their work.

• Customer success platforms rank only third in the list of technologies used by CS teams.
• AI-intensive technologies like standalone generative AI and sales/conversational intelligence rank in the bottom five with single-digit usage percentages.
• Journey mapping and journey orchestration tools, which typically incorporate AI capabilities, also show low adoption rates among CS teams.

Potential explanations: The correlation between lower AI enthusiasm and lower adoption of AI-heavy tools suggests a possible causality question.

• 27% of customer success respondents don’t believe generative AI will significantly impact their function.
• This skepticism might stem from limited exposure to effective AI implementations specifically designed for customer success use cases.

Future investigation: Forrester plans to examine whether this represents a missed opportunity for enhancing customer experiences.

• Research will focus on identifying both popular and cutting-edge applications of generative AI in post-sale customer engagement.
• The investigation will explore whether the issue stems from a lack of CS-specific AI technologies or insufficient prioritization of post-sale functions by technology vendors.